


Stranger Depths

by Chloe_at_Eleusis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Complete, Gen, Monologue, Oneshot, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:23:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chloe_at_Eleusis/pseuds/Chloe_at_Eleusis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermione kneels in a forest and ponders depths and currents and darkness. First-person vignette from Seventh Year. Oneshot, AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranger Depths

**Author's Note:**

> Copyrights to the characters and world are JKR's; the language herein is mine.

Hermione Granger loved to swim.

No-one at Hogwarts knew this about her, of course. Why should they? The only place to swim there was the Black Lake, and the merpeople and the squid made it unappealing if not hostile. Besides, the Black Lake was—black. Dark and cold, the hesitant lines of sunlight that shifted through the water reaching no more than 20 feet down.

Not like the cold green waters off the Irish coast. Or the warm, liquid azure of the Pacific island Hermione had visited with her parents when she was small. Waters that cradled and embraced her, that showed themselves to her as she moved through them.

She missed the sea. Missed it with an ache that sank through to her bones sometimes. Muggleborn, they said, ignorant of her mother's Irish heritage and what was almost certainly, Hermione was convinced, descent from a Selkie of some kind.

Not that it would have mattered. Had the wizarding world known, Hermione would simply have been treated like Hagrid or Professor Lupin. As half-human, rather than as a mudblood.

After her immersion in the Black Lake, she'd woken to that twisting ache to find it actually inflicting physical pain. Wondered, as she kissed her best friend's forehead, what the combination of magic and her mother's blood might have woken in her had she stayed submerged much longer.

Dangerous, yes. But then all things were dangerous when you dove deep.

And now Hermione swam in magic.

Knowledge was power. She'd known it from a young age, though she'd loved it for itself and not what it could bring her. Like the sea. Like magic.

She marveled at it, exulted in it, as surely as in the sea. Loved the feel, the glide of the power as it rippled round her. Loved breathing it in and exhaling it in strings of syllables and inscriptions and equations as fluid as the magic which formed them. It was the only thing she could have dreamt, could have imagined, that was better than diving into the cradling embrace of the sea: Magic, a force that flowed like water and let her breathe it like air.

And as with the sea, the riptides of power she rode—with incantation or inscription or equation—could tear apart the unwary.

She wondered at the fact that the thrashing currents left the students around her so untouched. So _unmoved_. At the fact that the teachers never mentioned that the powers they channeled were dangerous regardless of whether a wizard ever used Dark magic or not. It was only in Sixth Year, while watching that slimy sycophant Slughorn, that Hermione had realized that he didn't know. That several of her teachers _didn't know_.

It was a virtual certainty that Slughorn didn't. Nor Binns. Professors Burbage, Vector and Babbling seemed unperturbed by it as well. Even Professor Lupin had seemed unaware.

How could a man's bones be broken every month by the threshing power of the wolf which rode in his blood while he remained unaware of the power flowing about him?

But perhaps that was why. Having a physical reason to which he could pin the tearing agony must mean that he was less aware of other tides.

But Minerva McGonagall was aware of the liquid swirl of the magic. It was there in the intensity of her gaze at an erring student, the sternness of her demeanor as she controlled her classes. The same was true of Filius Flitwick—the stern-yet-cheerful excitement with which he taught his subject masking the same ruthless, constant scrutiny of the flow being channeled through the words and wands of the magic-users he taught.

And of course Albus Dumbledore knew. It was there in his eyes every time he looked out at the school from the high table, the penetrating blue gaze seeming to track the whorls eddying around each of his students.

So, oddly, did Severus Snape. For him, though, it was confined to the liquids which swirled in his students' cauldrons as he taught Potions. He never scrutinized the magic which swirled around his students—not even when he taught DADA. There it was as though his gaze—sneering and deadly though it was—was directed at the flood swirling around and through his own body.

Hermione understood what Snape was seeing later that year. Much too late.

So now she knelt in a forest and thought of the sea. Thought of bright lines of light in green depths while gazing into the orange heart of a tiny, smoking fire with her best friend in a tent behind her and the boy she'd thought she loved somewhere that wasn't here. That'd never be here, because thanks to the vortices of the magic she channeled, he couldn't find them now.

She didn't know whether the Horcrux was why Ron had left. At this point she didn't much care. He had left, and she and Harry were alone. And Harry, who'd always been alone—Harry who'd seen and felt more than anyone else she knew could have borne—had never been able to feel the flux of magic.

Maybe it was because of her mother. Maybe it was because she was a muggleborn, and ( _Was Voldemort right? Had that filthy hag Umbridge been_ right _?_ ) muggleborns weren't meant to wield magic. Maybe it was taken for granted by everyone else, and it was only she who feared the depths and the inexorable tug of the magic she treaded.

It was definitely only she who felt the bottom sinking away beneath she and Harry as the torrent swirled deeper and darker around them through the long, long, forever-long months. That the dimming world pressed in upon, blacker and colder and closer, stealing the air. There were times now when she spoke the incantations that the effort left her gasping for breath. ( _Perhaps that had always been Voldemort's plan._ )

Hermione closed her eyes, shivering in the faint warmth of the fire, and tilted her head back to feel the cold against her face. Pictured the green depths of the Irish sea about her, shoals sinking to black in the looming dark, and felt the chill, heavy swirl of currents which pressed fierce and heavy on her skin. Which sought access to her with a weight and pressure and limb-rending force that Hermione feared her frame could withstand for only a very little more time.

_(Let it be enough. Let Harry find them.)_

She knelt, blind in the surge of a shadowy riptide, and wondered what it would feel like to drown.

**Author's Note:**

> Written as I pondered knowledge and mortality and power, and the weight and fluidity of each. Your opinions are cherished, and your reviews are what keep bringing me back to this world again and again and yet again.  
> Best—  
> Chloe.


End file.
